Can You Tell These Real Crispr Projects From the Fake Ones?

Ever since Crispr stormed biology labs, scientists have been racing to put the genome-editing tool—the most precise and easiest ever—to use. Here are some real projects under way in labs and a few, well, less-than-real ones. Can you tell them apart?

Click each image to see the correct answer:

1. Muscle-bound superdogs OR Bruiseless bananas

So long, protein powder. Deleting just one growth-inhibiting gene creates dogs with twice as much muscle mass, which is apparently great for police and military dogs. Maybe not so great for family pets.

Bananas are a mighty convenient fruit: They come with their own handle and a natural wrapper. What is inconvenient is how easily they bruise. Crispr those blemishes away!

2. Genetic redos OR Pig-to-human transplants

So you’ve committed a crime and the police have your DNA—the one immutable part of any human being. But packed into viruses and inhaled, this new gene-editing tool gets to work rewriting your genetic fingerprint.

Pigs are pretty similar to humans, but we can’t borrow their organs … yet. Use Crispr to tweak several dozen genes and, hey, is that a pig-slash-human lung I see?

3. Mammoths! OR Pandas!

A woolly mammoth isn’t that different from an elephant. Scientists are splicing mammoth genes for small ears, fat, and hair into elephants. If this de-extinction works, the animal may one day roam the earth again.

Pandas are bad at having sex. Like embarrassingly bad. Crispr can’t save their sex lives, but scientists can use it to fix any bad genes in sperm, increasing the success rate of panda in vitro fertilization.

3. Germ killers OR Vegan cats

Superbugs are taking over—but maybe the best way to fight drug-resistant bacteria isn’t with drugs at all. Crispr can search out and destroy superbugs, identifying and then obliterating their unique gene sequences.